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These
days I am often asked what I did in Tehran as bombs fell
during the Iran-Iraq war. My interlocutors are
invariably surprised, if not shocked, when I tell them
that I read James, Eliot, Plath and great Persian poets
like Rumi and Hafez. Yet it is
precisely during such
times, when our lives are transformed by violence, that
we need works of imagination to confirm our faith in
humanity, to find hope amid the rubble of a hopeless
world. Memoirs from concentration camps and the gulag
attest to this. I keep returning to the words of Leon
Staff, a Polish poet who lived in the Warsaw ghetto:
"Even more than bread we now need poetry in a time
when it seems that it is not needed at all."
I think back to the eight-year war with Iraq, a time when
days and nights seemed indistinguishable, and were
reduced to the sound of the siren, warning us of the
next air attack. I often reminded my students at Allameh
Tabatabai University that while
guns roared and the Winter Palace was stormed,
Nabokov sat at his desk writing poetry.
My Tehran classroom at times overflowed with students
who ignored the warnings about Iraq's chemical bombs so
they could reckon with Tolstoy's ability to
defamiliarize (a term coined by the Russian Formalist
critics) everyday reality and offer it to us through new
eyes. The excitement that came from discovering a hidden
truth about "Anna Karenina" told me that Iraqi
missiles had not succeeded in their mission. Indeed, the
more Saddam Hussein wanted us to be defined by
terror, the more we craved beauty.
If
I felt compelled to keep rereading the classics, it was
in order to see the light in the eyes of my students.
I remember two young women, clad from head to toe in
black chadors, looking as if nothing in the world
mattered more than the idea that "Pride and
Prejudice" was subversive because it taught us
about our right to make our own choices
Among my scribbled notes from those days I found a quote
from Saul Bellow about writers in the Soviet work camps.
To my friends in the United States who are skeptical
about the importance of imagination in times of war, let
me share his words: "Perhaps
to remain a poet in such circumstances is also to reach
the heart of politics. The human feelings, human
experiences, the human form and face, recover their
proper place – the foreground."
And so
a new war has begun, though this time it is my adopted
country and not the country of my birth that is fighting
Iraq. Nothing will replace the lives lost. Still,
I will take some comfort now as I did then by opening a
book.
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